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You’re seven when you meet him, and he’s six.
He insists that he’s six and a half, thank you, as he pulls himself to sit on the wall beside you. He’s small, smaller than you and Stuart and definitely smaller than Peter. His socks are still clean and white, the cuffs of his jumper crisp and new, and he kicks his feet.
He says he’s called David, and he smiles at you in that little way of his.
You tell him you’re Don, and sitting next to him, with your skinned knees and scuffed shoes, you smile and he laughs with you.
*
You’re twenty-one and you get a call from the college medical centre. You’d forgotten you were Posner’s emergency contact, always assumed that’d gone to Akthar since they started living together during second year.
But still you go, shaking hands gripping the handlebars of your bike, the one you’ve had since Cutlers, and you meet him in the doctor’s office with a stricken look on your face.
You’d stopped by his flat, on the way, and picked up the dog-eared Browning anthology you’d bought him as an eighteenth birthday present. You thought he might like it.
He looks at you with an odd expression when you walk in, and you hope you’ve managed to train your expression into something less horrified.
“David.”
You can’t remember the last time you called him David.
Neither can he, judging by the look on his face.
“Thank you,” he says, voice a little stilted and dry. “For coming. You didn’t have to.”
“I did,” you scoff, suddenly remembering the anthology and hold it out to him. “Thought you’d appreciate this. Little things, you know?”
“Yes,” he says quietly, more to his lap than to you, “little things.”
*
You’re ten and you’re teaching David to ride his bike.
He pouts every time he overbalances, and you laugh and dust down his knees and help him up, and he pretends to be annoyed with you until you flick him on the elbow and he giggles.
Eventually, when he can just about keep up with you, you start racing home from school together.
Mrs. Posner always smiles broadly at the both of you and plies you with cakes and hot chocolate. You think she’s just pleased he’s making friends.
*
You’re twenty-two and you’re moving in together. You could never agree quite where you wanted to live –he wanted the countryside and you wanted the city, so you compromised and now you’re the proud tenants of a tiny one room flat in the suburbs.
Between the furniture and your collective library of books there’s barely room to walk or write or cook but it’s yours and you quite like the quiet domesticity of it. You sit at the dining table with your typewriter, swearing under your breath every time you make a mistake -and David smiles at that, he always does- while he marks homework opposite you, red pen running messily across another forty essays on Romeo and Juliet.
It might not be as flashy as Dakin’s apartment in central London with the lovers that come and go, but the central heating works most of the time, and on nights it doesn’t you bundle together under all of your extra blankets and you kiss him until you don’t feel the cold anymore.
*
You’re thirteen and slaving through piano lessons to please your mother. You frequently point out the fact that you do not, and likely never will, own a piano but it never bothers you enough to stop.
Posner -and he’s Posner now, not David, just like you’re Scripps and not Don, not anymore, not since starting Cutlers and Dakin forming this little ragtag band of his- has his singing lessons next door, and sometimes, when he’s finished and you have too, he’ll come into your classroom and talk to you until it starts to get dark and the caretakers come round and threaten to lock you both in.
Other times, he’ll sheepishly, shyly even, offer you a piece of sheet music and you’ll play while he leans in over your shoulder and sings along. Neither of you are perfect, not yet, but you enjoy yourselves and you always leave with quiet smiles on your faces.
*
You’re twenty-three when he first asks you if you want to spend Christmas together. You’re not normally one for celebrating, but David’s parents had passed away last year and he hadn’t wanted to celebrate Hanukkah like usual, so you’d strung up a few cheap fairy lights around the window in your flat, bought a tiny plastic tree and hung a few oversized baubles on it and made a shoddy attempt at a Christmas dinner.
David had tried to grin and bear the overcooked turkey and the charred potatoes, until you’d laughed embarrassedly and ordered a take away.
You don’t do presents, but you do curl up under a blanket on the ratty old sofa and watch the Queen’s speech on the tiny telly on the other side of the room.
*
You’re sixteen and Posner fancies Dakin. You can tell.
You think you might hate him a little bit, at times. Dakin, that is –he’s your best mate, sure, but you notice the look on Posner’s face when he ignores him for the fifth time in an hour and you don’t like it.
There’s a series of increasingly bitter definitions crammed into the margins of your journal, festering beside genuine poetic thoughts and reasoning.
When Dakin laughs to you about silly little Posner and his silly little affections on your walk home from school, you don’t even smile.
You don’t tell Posner, when he asks if Dakin talks about him.
*
You’re twenty-four when you move out of the flat and into an actual house. You consider it an achievement, and vehemently refuse all of Dakin’s suggestions of a housewarming party.
At first it feels a little too big for just the two of you, so you adopt a moody grizzled grey cat from the local shelter and find he fills up the space with noises and mess just enough.
David calls him Whitman, which makes you smile, even though he sits on your papers all the time and leaves fur all over the suits you need for work and meetings and eats David’s ties when he thinks no one is watching.
You come home from the journal office every day to find Whitman twisting himself around David’s legs while he cooks dinner, and the whole thing is so horribly domestic that you grin, stupidly and to no one but yourself.
*
You’re eighteen and you’re scared.
You don’t tell anyone this, of course, no one except God, and you suspect even He’s a little sick of hearing from you these days.
You think Posner can tell, though, from the pinched way he smiles at you when he meets you outside the church every Sunday. You wonder if he’s scared, too.
You don’t ask. You think he wouldn’t want you to.
*
You’re twenty-five and your first book’s been released and is floating its way up the bestseller list, and David showers you in congratulatory kisses the moment you wake up. He should get up and leave for work, but instead he tucks himself under your arm and kisses you and kisses you and kisses you.
*
You’re nineteen and you’re at Oxford, you survived and you’re just about keeping afloat with the work and your social life. You see less of the Cutlers boys, now you’ve been scattered across different colleges, but Dakin still finds an excuse to pop into your room and annoy you on at least a weekly basis.
You see a lot of Posner, really, and you spend a lot of your time together reading in companionable silence, in your room or in his, or in the gardens during the warmer months. He’s moved on from Dakin now, and he seems much happier for it.
It’s enough to make you smile into the battered old copy of Frankenstein that you’re reading for the umpteenth time. He doesn’t notice.
*
You’re twenty and you feel like now is about the time you should be having a crisis of faith. Except you don’t feel like you need to, not really.
You suppose you’ve known for a while that you’re interested in men, so it’s hardly a great revelation to you that you’re interested in Posner. Part of you wonders if you always have been.
Privately, you think you have.
You talk to Akthar, because you can’t tell Posner and Dakin would only laugh at you, and he’s the one that first mentions your faith.
You tell him that you don’t know, and that you’d always assumed God didn’t really mind, as long as you loved him too. Akthar smiles, nods minutely and then changes the topic.
You’re glad of it.
*
You’re twenty-one and you walk him home from hospital and you kiss him on his doorstep.
He kisses you back.
*
and would it have been worth it, after all
would it have been worth while,
after the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
after the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor–
and this, and so much more?
– T. S. Eliot